Whether he is part of Chennai Super Kings as a player or not come 2022, MS Dhoni and the franchise will continue to be inseparable, as far as N Srinivasan is concerned.

"Dhoni is part and parcel of CSK, Chennai and Tamil Nadu. There is no CSK without Dhoni and there is no Dhoni without CSK," Srinivasan, a former BCCI and ICC boss and managing director as well as vice-chairman of India Cements, which owns the Super Kings franchise through a subsidiary, was quoted as saying by PTI on Monday.

Dhoni has been the Super Kings captain, and the face of the team and the franchise, since the inception of the IPL in 2008, and has led the team into the knockouts/playoffs every year except when the team was banned - 2016 and 2017 - and last season, when they finished seventh, winning four trophies in the process.

This season, despite an ageing team and a lot of doubters following the poor run last year, when the team struggled to find its bearings in the UAE, Super Kings won nine of the 14 league games to finish second on the table, beat table-toppers Delhi Capitals in Qualifier 1 to reach the final, and then won a one-sided contest against Kolkata Knight Riders. That gave Super Kings, and Dhoni, their fourth IPL trophy, one behind Mumbai Indians (and Rohit Sharma), to go with two titles at the now-defunct Champions League T20.

During the course of the season, when answering a question about his future with the franchise, 40-year-old Dhoni, who was recently unveiled as the Indian team's mentor at the T20 World Cup, had said, "You'll see me in yellow next season but whether I'll be playing for CSK, you never know."

The BCCI has not yet made public the retention policy for the eight existing franchises prior to the next mega auction - where two new teams will also be in the fray for the 2022 IPL.

Whether Dhoni is retained or not could well depend on those rules and regulations, and after winning the final in Dubai last week, Dhoni had told host broadcaster Star Sports, "We have to decide what is good for CSK, you know. It's not really about me being there in the top three or four, whatever the retained number of players is.

"It's about making a strong core and making sure the franchise doesn't really suffer, because it will be an auction where you have to make a team for the next ten years. Definitely in 2008, the core group carried on for more than ten years. We'll have to have a hard look as to... in the next ten years, who are the people who will contribute in a similar manner."

But, when discussing the legacy he would be leaving behind at Super Kings, assuming he was done as a player, Dhoni had responded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "But still, I haven't left [it] behind!"